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Hailed as a medical classic, and the subject of a major feature film as well as radio and stage plays and various TV documentaries, Awakenings by Oliver Sacks is the extraordinary account of a group of twenty patients. Rendered catatonic by the sleeping-sickness epidemic that swept the world just after the First World War, all twenty had spent forty years in hospital: motionless and speechless; aware of the world around them, but exhibiting no interest in it – until Dr Sacks administered the then-new drug, L-DOPA, which caused them, temporarily, to awake from their decades-long slumber.

In this extraordinary book, Dr Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.

1985 veröffentlicht. “Populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction. Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be.” (Sunday Times) (695 Rezensionen / 4,2 Sterne), 289 Seiten noch günstig?

Have you ever seen something that wasn’t really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one’s own body. Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them.

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: ‚Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far‘. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks’s earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels – sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.

2015 veröffentlicht. “In February this year Sacks revealed that he has terminal cancer. He wrote in The New York Times that, though not without fear, his predominant feeling is gratitude. „I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return.“ This book is a remarkable record of those exchanges” (London Evening Standard) (662 Rezensionen / 4,5 Sterne), 256 Seiten noch günstig?

In chapters examining savants and synaesthetics, depressives and musical dreamers, Sacks succeeds not only in articulating the musical experience but in locating it in the human brain. He shows that music is not simply about sound, but also movement, visualization, and silence. He follows the experiences of patients suddenly drawn to or suddenly divorced from music. And in so doing he shows, as only he can, both the extraordinary spectrum of human expression and the capacity of music to heal.

2007 veröffentlicht. “A gifted writer and a neurologist, Sacks spins one fascinating tale after another to show what happens when music and the brain mix it up.” (Newsweek) (378 Rezensionen / 4,4 Sterne), 448 Seiten noch günstig?